So I originally rolled a sorc because I wanted to play fireball now that it is finally viable for most stuff even if its not great. Got to like 73 and found the illuminator gloves and then immediately dropped the character because it didn’t feel like fireball anymore it felt like d3 WD firebomb which I don’t enjoy at all. Instantly rerolled into barb and I have to say…
Barb is way funner this season, these vampiric powers are much better than S1’s malignant hearts:
-way less annoying to use
-moonrise is the greatest thing they ever added, I finally feel like I’m not punished for using a basic skill and lunging strike with it is really fun
-we have plenty of options both defensively and offensively
-upgrading them and them just being there to change at will feels way better than finding new malignant hearts
-changing pacts on gear is not punishing at all
-the open world zone is actually rewarding, so we can wander around killing stuff and not be punished for it
I have been pushing NM dungeons with a CC HoTa barb and it feels like an actual video game now. I am dodging stuff because everything one shots me, lunging strike dashing to avoid elemental projectiles because of the res changes… prioritizing dangerous enemies to cc with my frostburn/butchercleaver/luckyhitstun/shared misery hits, reactively using Ironskin and ground stomp… saving WoTB for big packs and desperately trying to smash them as fast as possible before the aoe elemental stuff everywhere kills me… it is actually difficult and engaging gameplay now.
Why is it difficult?
Because I have a reason to make it difficult, the higher lvl monsters I kill the better loot that drops, this is the single most important change they have made… I made suggestion posts back in preseason and S1 about exactly this. Scaling item power based on MLVL.
Unfortunately I don’t think most players will have the same experience, they may not be challenging themselves or just using OP builds that make everything easy mode but I do think they have made a lot of good changes this season.
Now for the negatives of the season, they missed the mark on some stuff and we still have to wait for a lot of important things:
-they didn’t add the option to remove combat text, they included it to the option to disable damage numbers which is useless because we want the damage numbers
-they didn’t add a favorite button for loot, its the same button as junking, why?
-they said resistances would be an easy problem for players to solve, but its actually not… rings and amulets barely have you in the positives by themselves… i think this is actually ok it makes res on gear not feel so bad, but the problem is that there are still too many bad gear affixes
-tons of bad gear affixes still, seriously just remove some of the underused ones the pool is so bloated it makes D4 itemization feel way worse than it has to
-we still drop blue and white items on the ground in WT4
-no loot filter, sorting through rares is still too much labor and its annoying
-no where to store aspects, extracting aspects should be free and just allow players to store the 5 highest rolled ones in the codex for each aspect or something
-stash space is still terrible, way worse if you got more than one character
I also think the skill tree is way underdeveloped and we need an actual crafting system. I think the paragon board is great but they should develop new boards and give us more options, hopefully in expansions they do.
Anyone else pushing while massively underleveled? I think group play is also funner for it too, when things gets too rough just bring a friend in there and support eachother. To me it doesn’t feel like I just have to mindlessly stack damage damage and more damage anymore, and defenses don’t feel like one dimensional like last season… where we just stacked armor and more armor and got some DR on pants and stuff.
